64 newyork| february17–march1, 2020TheCULTUREPAGESit shareswithVladimirNabokov’stalea
disturbingallure. In theopeningchapter,
setin 2017 amidtherisingtideofpublic
re velationsaboutsexualharassmentand
abuse,thenarrator,Vanessa,seesonFace-
bookthatanotherwomanhasaccusedher
high-schoolEnglishteacher,JacobStrane,
ofsexualassault.Yearsearlier, whenVan-
essawasjust 15 andhewas42,sheand
Stranebegana sexualrelationship.But
Vanessadoesn’t jointhechorusofvoices
demandinghisfiring.Instead,stonedand
lyinginbedthatnight,shecallstheteacher
andaskshimtorecountoneoftheirsexual
encounterswhileshemasturbates.Like
RussellwhenshefirstreadLolita,Vanessa
allowsherselftoimaginethatthiskindof
relationshipcouldbelove.
Overtheyears,throughendlessdrafts
anditerations,Russellminedmany details
ofthestory fromherlife.Like Russell,
Vanessagrewuponanisolatedlake in
Maine;like Russell,Vanessaattendeda
privatehighschoolfortwoyearsbefore
withdrawing.Maybeyou’rewondering
nowif theotherthingis truetoo:DidRus-
sell,likeVanessa,haveanaffairwithher
high-schoolteacher?Inanauthor’s note,
Russellurgesreadersagainst jumpingto
theconclusionthatthenovelrelatesherate elizabeth russell traces the beginning ofher obsession with Lolita to an encounter with the musician Jakob Dylan.
It was 1997, and the novelist was 13 years old, precocious and bored, living
on an isolated lake some 15 miles east of Bangor, Maine. Dylan, then in his
late 20s, was coming to town with his band, the Wallflowers, and he wanted
to meet Stephen King, the local royalty. Russell’s father happened to be a
DJ for King’s radio station, and he arranged a dinner. Russell and her
cousin got to tag along. She remembers trembling through the meal, strug-
gling to contain her excitement as she watched the charismatic front man
tear apart a bread roll with his hands. Later, she read everything she could
find about him. In a Rolling Stone profile, he declared his favorite book
was Lolita. She couldn’t check the book out from her local library—every
copy had been lost or stolen—but she discovered the text on a rudimentary
website and felt a thrill when she realized it was about a sexual relationship
between a girl around her own age and a much older man. “I didn’t know
thatwasanoption,” sherecalledthinking at the time.
“secret history.” She knew that some peo-
ple, like her old M.F.A.-workshop class-
mates, would assume the book was a work
of autofiction—a titillating notion height-
ened by the editor’s note prefacing review
copies, which states that Russell’s story
had been “inspired by her own teenage
experiences with older men.”
But she didn’t anticipate the trap she
would fall into by refusing to be explicit
about her personal life. In the weeks lead-
ing up to the book’s debut, she would go
from seeing her name on almost every list
of the most eagerly awaited books of 2020
to finding herself at the center of a scandal,
one of several that have shaken the publish-
ing world less than two months into the
new year. It unfolded on Twitter, where
Russell was accused of stealing her story
from another woman’s memoir; some went
so far as to demand that she prove she had
been abused herself.
Russell denied the accusations of plagia-
rism but insisted on maintaining the bound-
ary she had drawn around her own experi-
ences. She deleted her Twitter account and
waited out the storm at her home in Madi-
son, Wisconsin, doing puzzles with her hus-
band in order to avoid looking at her phone.
When I reached her there, she pointed out
the eerie similarities between the contro-
versy and her novel. The book (which shifts
between the years 2000 and 2017) derives
much of its dramatic tension from the adult
Vanessa’s unwillingness to open up about
what happened to her as a teenager. Russell
kept thinking about one section in particu-
lar, in which a journalist urges Vanessa to go
public with her affair, threatening to publish
the story whether or not she agrees to an
interview. Vanessa refuses. She remembers
a photograph of herself at 17, “looking like a
Lolita” as she lifted her skirt and stared
directly at the camera. She thinks, I wonder
how much victimhood they’d be willing to
grant a girl like me.when i first met Russell, in the middle
of January, she had yet to be accused of any-
thing. We were in the backyard of a Geor-
gian restaurant in Greenwich Village, shel-
tered by a glass canopy from the pounding
rain and surrounded by tropical greenery,
fake boulders, and out-of-date Christmas
decorations. “To go to New York and to have
an editor who has an office in a big building
is all pretty much purely fantasy,” she said, as
she fidgeted with the oversize buttons on her
fuzzy pink cardigan, her dark, wavy hair
partly obscuring one eye. “I keep reminding
myself that it’s literally a dream come true.”
Neither of Russell’s parents attended col-
lege, and she was broke for most of her 20s
and early 30s as she worked on drafts of theOne of the strangest aspects of the cul-
tural legacy of Lolita, the story of a man in
his late 30s who kidnaps and repeatedly
rapes a 12-year-old girl, is the fact that so
many people through the decades have read
it as a love story. Russell was not an excep-
tion. The paperback edition she eventually
bought was splashed with a quote from
Vanity Fair calling the novel “the only con-
vincing love story of our century.” She would
sometimes point to that quote when she got
into arguments with friends who dismissed
the book as highbrow pornography for
pedophiles. Around a year after she read it,
she began to work on her own novel about
the relationship between a young girl and a
much older man. Hers was a love story too,
she told me over lunch in Manhattan a few
weeks ago. At least, that’s how she saw it
back then and for many years after.
The book, My Dark Vanessa, which will
be published next month, some 20 years
after Russell began writing it, has been the
toast of the publishing world since late
2018, when William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins, bought it for seven figures—
making it one of the most expensive debut
novels of that year. Provocative and absorb-
ing, it has been hailed as “Lolita for the
#MeToo era” (Entertainment Weekly), and